I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise

with the milkweeds splitting at the seams emancipating their seedsthat were once packed in their pods like the wings and hollow bonesof a damp bird held too tightly in a green hand. And the giant jademoths stuck to the screen door as if glued there. And the gold fieldsand stone silos and the fugitive cows known for escaping their borders.

I have lived in a painting called Paradise, and even the bad partswere beautiful. There are fields of needles arranged into flowers,their sharp ends meeting at the center, and from a distance the fieldsfull of needle flowers look blue from their silver reflecting the sky,or white lilies if the day is overcast, and there in the distance is a meadow

filled with the fluttering skirts of opium poppies. On the hillsideis Moon Cemetery, where the tombstones are hobnailed or prismedlike cut-glass bowls, and some are shaped so precisely like the trunks of treesthat birds build their nests in the crooks of their granite limbs, and someof the graves are shaped like child-sized tables with stone tablecloths

and tea cups, yes, I have lived in a painting called Paradise.The hollyhocks loom like grandfathers with red pocket watches,and off in the distance the water is ink and the ships are white paperwith scribblings of poems and musical notations on their sides.There are rabbits: mink-colored ones and rabbits that are mystics

humped like haystacks, and at Moon Cemetery it’s an everyday eventto see the dead rise from their graves, as glittering as they were in life,to once more pick up the plow or the pen or the axe or the spoonor the brush or the bowl, for it is a cemetery named after a moonand moons never stay put. There are bees in the air flying off

to build honeycombs with pollen heavy on their back legs,and in the air, birds of every ilk, the gray kind that feed from the ground,and the ones that scream to announce themselves, and the ravenswho feed on the rabbits until their black feathers are edgedin gold, and in the air also are little gods and devils trying out their wings,

some flying, some failing and making a little cream-colored blipin the sea, yes, all of my life I have lived in a painting called Paradisewith its frame of black varnish and gold leaf, and I am told some girlsslide their fingers over the frame and feel the air outside of it,and some even climb over the edge and plummet into whatever

is beyond it. Some say it is hell, and some say just another, bolderparadise, and some say a dark wilderness, and some say just an unsweptmuseum or library floor, and some say a long-lost love waits therewearing bloody riding clothes, returned from war, and some sayfreedom, which is a word that tastes strange, like a green plum.

Diane Seuss is the author of four books of poetry: Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018); Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015); Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (New Issues Press, 1998).

More by Diane Seuss

The grief, when I finally contacted it
decades later, was black, tarry, hot,
like the yarrow-edged side roads
we walked barefoot in the summer.
Sometimes we’d come upon a toad
flattened by a car tire, pressed into
the softened pitch, its arms spread out
a little like Jesus, and it was now
part of the surface of the road, part
of the road’s story. Then there was
the live toad I discovered under
the poison leaves of the rhubarb,
hiding there among the ruby stems,
and if you ate those stems raw,
enough of them, you’d shit yourself
for days. It isn’t easy to catch a living
thing and hold it until it pees on you
in fear. Its skin was the dull brown
of my father’s clothes, my grandfather’s
clothes as he stood behind the barber’s
chair, clipping sideburns, laying a warm
heap of shaving cream over a bristly chin,
sharpening his straight razor and swiping it
over the foam-covered cheek of my father,
who often shaved twice a day, his beard
was so obstinate, even in the hospital bed.
When I laid a last kiss on his young cheek,
the scraping hurt my lips. Do you ever
wonder, in your heart of hearts,
if God loves you, if the angels love you,
scowling, holding their fiery swords,
radiating green light? If your father
loved you, if he had room to love you,
given his poverty and suffering, or if
a coldness had set in, a cold-bloodedness,
like Keats at the end, wanting a transfusion
of the reader’s life blood so he could live
again. Either way, they’re all safely
underground, their gentleness or ferocity,
their numb love, and my father’s
tar-colored hair, and the fibers of his good
suit softened by wood tannins,
and grandfather’s glass eye with its
painted-on mud-colored iris,
maybe all that’s left of him in that walnut
box, and Keats and his soft brown clothes,
and the poets before and after him.
But their four-toed emissary sits
in my hand. I feel the quickening pulse
through its underbelly. Hooded eyes,
molasses-tinged, unexpressive,
the seam of its mouth glued shut.

If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottomof the cage I bury it, like God tromping the skyin his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon,raging and sobbing in his Hush Puppy houseslippers with the backs broke down, no Mrs.God to make him reasonable as he gets outthe straight razor to slice the hair off his face,using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyoneknows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror,like God is a terrible simile for me but likeGod with his mirror, I use it.